“Screams are rare, but memorable,
mirrored in the faces of those
who do not make them."That is from a poem, “The Keep,” by Christian Wiman in the November 13 issue of The New Yorker.
. . .
Writing is “the experience of watching what’s happening in the lines as the experience of the sounds and rhythms and the experience of emotions and knowledge that’s gained.”That is the late poet David Ferry, who died this month at age 99, as quoted in his New York Times obituary.
. . .
"Huge clouds formed in the sky, followed by a strange darkness that rushed toward the horizon, chasing a sound wave so intense that it lasted for minutes, as the sonic boom bounced between the stratosphere and the ocean. The roar of the bomb was deafening. 'It was magnificent, like a hundred thunderstorms coming at us from all directions. It seemed that the heavens would burst. Our ears rang and ached for hours,' said one of the sailors who witnessed it from a battleship at sea.”That is a description of a bomb being dropped, from Maniac, the new novel by Benjamín Labatut (whose When We Cease to Understand the World is a must-read about the intersection of physics and existentialism).